Author: Barbara Neely
Publisher: Brash Books
Rating: WARTY!
DISCLOSURE: Unlike the majority of reviews in this blog, I've neither bought this book nor borrowed it from the library. This is a "galley" copy ebook, supplied by Net Galley. I'm not receiving (nor will I expect to receive or accept) remuneration for this review. The chance to read a new book is often enough reward aplenty!
Today is Barbara Neely day on my blog! Either that or it's Blanche White day. This is the second of two reviews I'm posting today on books in author Barbara Neely's 'Blanche White' series. I've had a good relationship with Brash Books, so it’s nice to be able to find a book from them which I can positively review! Unfortunately, it's not this one.
I really liked the first volume and reviewed it positively, so I was excited to have a chance to read the very next one. I'm not a fan of book series normally, so it's a joy to find a series that I like. I'd hoped this would be one of them, but I was really turned off this one by the racist diatribes espoused by the main character with which this novel was shot through.
Character Blanche White, whom I liked (with some reservations!) in the first volume, was very nearly ferocious in her grudge against white people in this volume. For a character who outright says at one point that she can't understand why some people are fixated on color, she hypocritically rants about color and white privilege on very nearly every page! She even rants against people of her own race because their skin is lighter than hers! I had issues with Blanche in volume one. In this volume I could not stand her.
I just could not believe how frequently color was mentioned in this novel and I began to think maybe I had just become overly-sensitive to it, so at the point where I quit reading this book (about 50% through), I went back to the start and began a search for the words 'black' and 'white' - only when connected with skin color. The author has one character or another (mostly Blanche) mentioning 'white' in this context on every other page on average. 'Black' is mentioned six times on page one alone, and twenty one times in the first five pages! In the first 90 pages, which is where I quit reading this, the word black as related to skin color appears eighty-three times. There's very nearly on every single page on average.
Who wants to read a metronomic litany of references to skin color? Not me. I seriously began to wonder what the author thought she was achieving with this. This volume was so different in tone from the first one that I almost couldn't believe it was the same author - and this was written only two years after the first volume in this series.
Blanche, the main character, is someone who got herself into money troubles in the first volume, and got herself out when she figured out who was behind a series of murders. She's a smart woman who sometimes does dumb stuff. She's good at heart, but also a racist at heart, and it seems like this condition has deteriorated since the previous volume. I don't mind a book about racial issues. I find nothing to entertain me in a non-stop diatribe or an endless rant.
Blanche is also hypocritical in her obsession with how much attention others pay to skin color given that it’s on her mind all the time, too. She quite literally cannot look at a person without defining them by their skin color - high yellow, redbone, dark, light-skinned, white, yellow! I'm serious: every single character we meet is defined by their color. For me I don't care what color they are, I just want a good story. I can't enjoy a story where no one amounts to anything more than the hue of their skin and the author is intent upon pushing that into the reader's face at every turn.
I have to mention the cover here, too, even though the author has nothing to say about the cover she gets unless she self-publishes. We’re told that Blanche is a size fifteen, so I have to remark that the silhouette of Blanche on the cover of this series seems to me to be exaggerated in an unfortunate direction. On this particular cover there's a second issue, which is the obvious observation that dying of electrocution in the bathtub hasn’t ever been known to turn the water red to my knowledge! The cover goes way beyond realistic into purely sensational. I can't recommend this novel.
